David Miliband puts in his bid for biggest bashing of Brexit

Former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband has made one of the most thunderous attacks on Brexit yet by a senior political figure.

Speaking to Radio 5 Live, Labour’s ‘leader who never was’ said that Britain was trashing its own history by going ahead with leaving the European Union.

"Brexit, by definition, is trashing the history of the last 40 years. I think it is putting at severe risk many of the gains. I see Brexit as an act of unilateral political disarmament," he said.

"It’s the greatest giveaway of political power that a country has voluntarily ever done, because we are ceding our position at the table with 27 other countries."

Miliband, who now runs the International Rescue Committee charity, also it had been "dangerously premature" of the government trigger article 50 in March.

His intervention - in an interview to promote his new book about the refugee crisis - is strong stuff indeed. But not quite as strong as an intervention on the same subject earlier this year by Labour peer Andrew Adonis.

Speaking to The House magazine in July, Adonis took a clear lead in the race to slam Brexit in the most dramatic terms - by comparing leaving the EU to British appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s:

"To my mind, it’s as big a step that we’re taking as a country as decolonisation in the 1950s and 60s, and appeasement in the 1930s," he said.

"We got it right on decolonisation; we got it wrong on appeasement, and I think we’re in serious danger of getting it wrong in the way that we leave the EU."